Please note: This PhD seminar will take place online.
Joel Wretborn, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
Supervisor: Professor Christopher Batty
Many familiar fluid phenomena involve interacting air and water, including ocean waves, waterfalls, splashes, underwater bubbles, airborne droplets, and surface foam. A challenging aspect of simulating these effects are the broad range of physical scales they cover: from millimeter-sized droplets to large ocean waves which could span hundreds of meters across. A common strategy is to leverage different simulation techniques at different scales, but these solvers may produce inconsistent motion where their scales overlap.
In this seminar, I will present an alternative approach based on mixture modeling. Both air and water are discretized on a shared Eulerian grid, in which phase fractions are represented using material points. By adopting established two-fluid closures for under-resolved and grid-resolved material, the method allows small- and large-scale features to coexist and smoothly transition between scales. I will show how the resulting multiscale model can produce visually compelling simulations of large waterfalls, breaking waves, and underwater bubbles.